Mary Obering, Works from 1972 – 2003 (Installation View), via Bortolami

This month at Bortolami Gallery, the work of artist Mary Obering takes center stage. Surveying Obering’s prolific output from 1972 to 2003, the exhibition focuses on the artist’s singular approach to Minimalism and geometric abstraction, spanning both floors of the gallery, with the Upstairs dedicated to artworks from the 1970s, a nod to the artist’s SoHo studio in which she took residency in 1971. (more…)

A group of artists in Berlin are protesting the use of the public Tempelhof Park as the site of private exhibitions. “The city should decide what happens there, and this really wasn’t a democratic decision,” says photographer Tobias Zielony. “I think the main question is: how did this two-year contract come into being?” (more…)

The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation is launching an ambitious multivolume catalogue raisonné for its namesake artist, available online and free for all to access. “There is this kind of messiness to Rauschenberg’s career, and we didn’t want to artificially clean it up,” says Julie Blaut, senior director of curatorial affairs at the organization. (more…)

President Biden has reversed the prior rule on public art commissions for public buildings put in place by President Donald Trump, which had stipulated that only “historically significant Americans or events of American historical significance or illustrate the ideals upon which our Nation was founded,” could be considered. (more…)

Petra Cortright, YAMAHA CDRW-4260T_vampire erotica archives TYPOGRAPHY MICROSOFT (2021), via Foxy Production

On view this month at Foxy Production, the gallery has assembled a show of new works by the artist Petra Cortright, marking her third solo exhibition with the gallery. Presenting images framed as “distillations” of the imagery that dominates our every day, this  new series of digital paintings uses Angel Wing Clematis, a white narrow-petalled climbing-vine flower—thought to symbolize knowledge and aspiration—as its central motif. (more…)

A piece in the NYT notes the Uffizi Gallery’s new focus on contemporary art. “The Uffizi very rarely in the past had contemporary art exhibitions,” says director Eike Schmidt. “It was seen as intruding on these sacred halls.” (more…)

Frieze Los Angeles has cancelled a public sculpture show in Beverly Hills Park amid shipping delays and labor shortages caused by Covid-19. “We have determined that we do not have sufficient artworks to realize a full-scale public-sculpture installation,” fair spokesperson Belinda Bowring says. (more…)

Rose Wylie, Battle in Heaven (Film Notes) (2008), via Zabludowicz Collection

Currently on view this month at the Zabludowicz Collection, a selection of the institution’s holdings are presented as a look at the progression and evolution of figuration in modern practice. The Stand-Ins brings together 19 artists who deploy autobiographical elements and a cast of imagined characters in the construction of their paintings and narratives, and maps lines of influence across generations, featuring seminal figures alongside important new voices. (more…)

Christie’s has an impressive Lucian Freud portrait of his former lover Janey Longman for its March sales in London, expected to fetch between £10 million–£15 million ($13.4 million–$20 million). “The dexterous handling of the paint sumptuously brings every detail of the sitter’s body into sharp focus,” Katharine Arnold, head of postwar and contemporary art at Christie’s Europe, said in a statement. “The gentle framing of her pose within the composition seems to invite the viewer closer still, a witness to this moment of contemplation.” (more…)

Art Basel will delay the opening of its Hong Kong fair until May following a recent surge in Covid cases.  “We believe shifting the fair to May is the right decision given the current development of the pandemic and its impact on international travel restrictions,” says Adeline Ooi, Art Basel’s Director Asia. “By taking the decision early, our aim is to support our galleries in advance planning for their 2021 programs. We very much look forward to hosting our show in May next year and to welcoming gallerists, collectors, and art lovers back to Hong Kong at that time.” (more…)

Vito Schnabel has purchased the Chelsea exhibition space that he has been renting. “It’s an incredible space with amazing light. The artists love it and embrace it as well,” he says. “Chelsea has always been a special neighborhood for me, and I’m happy to be a part of its fabric.” (more…)

Giorgio Griffa, Dittico lieve odulaato (1996), via Casey Kaplan

On view at Casey Kaplan this month in New York, the gallery has unified a series of works created by the Italian artist Giorgio Griffa, creating a near-past retrospective that explores the artist’s work over the last 20 years throguh a selection of seven paintings. This exhibition marks the fifth iteration in a series of exhibitions focusing on the artist’s practice by decade, continuing a conceptual exercise that has offered concise but attentive looks at his work over the course of his career. (more…)

The Whitney has released a 63-artist list for its upcoming Biennial, which will open this April, under the title “Quiet as It’s Kept.” “The Whitney Biennial is an ongoing experiment, the result of a shared commitment to artists and the work they do,” curators David Breslin and Adrienne Edwards said in a statement. “While many of these underlying conditions are not new, their overlapping, intensity, and sheer ubiquity created a context in which past, present, and future folded into one another. We’ve organized the exhibition to reflect these precarious and improvised times. The Biennial primarily serves as a forum for artists, and the works that will be presented reflect their enigmas, the things that perplex them, the important questions they are asking.” (more…)

Charles Ray gets a profile in the NYT this week, as he prepares to open a new show at The Met. “The pace and rate at which Ray works are important,” says Hamza Walker, the director of the nonprofit art space LAXART in Los Angeles. “It’s perverse on the one hand; he could sit with something for 20 years.” Ray, he observes, “distills down what we think we know, and it somehow becomes resonant, and produces reflections that show there’s so much more here than you know.”

(more…)

Matias Faldbakken, Beaten Ink, Upset Brick, Downcast Charcoal (Installation View), via Chantal Crousel

Marking his first solo exhibition at Galerie Chantal Crousel, artist Matias Faldbakken brings together a series of installations that unify drawings from 2017 to 2021 alongside a series of various groups of lacquered bricks, some locally sourced, others originating from Norway. The artist, who has often explored notions of antagonism and conflict, charging his works with a sort of disruptive, confrontational energy, here turns that notion towards the act of drawing itself. (more…)

On view this month at Anton Kern Gallery in New York, artist Chris Martin presents a body of new works that continue the artist’s luminous, colorful approach towards the painted canvas, and the continued relationships of scale that flow through so many of the artist’s works. On view on the first floor of the gallery space, a series of large-scale canvases and a smaller painting made in tribute to the late Lance De Los Reyes, present night skies, washes of color and surreal moments of explosive energy in a set of explorations of energy and space.

Images and depictions of the cosmos are a uniting thread among all of the paintings: inky night skies, planets, constellations, stars, and moons, continung a relationship between deep space and the landscapes in the near field. The artist, who has long drawn inspiration from time spent in the Catskills, where he would follow patterns and movements in the land and its wildlife, here takes those same iconographies and applies them towards unique expressions of space.

The influence is clear in all of these new works, a number of which were painted in his Catskills studio. The five paintings in the gallery’s back atrium are all atmospheric skyscapes—some seeming to directly depict the constellations and night sky of the open woods and fields. It is not only nature found in these works, but the influence of Brooklyn, music, and pop culture are also evident—in Telescope Sphinx in Outer Space, for example, Martin’s painted galaxy is populated by collaged images of Greta Garbo as the Sphinx, sailors, mushrooms, frogs, birds, musicians, and pot leaves—among others—creating humor and play in the cosmic heavens.

Martin’s work has long negotiated this peculiar space between the spiritual, the natural, and the pop cultural ether that seems to hold and envelope so much of his approach towards the image. Rather than place these notions in opposition, his pieces here present a fusion of all inputs, a harmony of inspiration that seems to place the distant vistas of outer space, the internal reveries of solitude, and everything between, on equal footing.

The show closes February 26th.

– D. Creahan

Read more:
Chris Martin at Anton Kern [Exhibition Site]

A piece in the New York Times profiles Stuart E. Eizenstat, the diplomat and lawyer who has long advised on the process of restituting Nazi-looted art, and who will now take on his first court case seeking the return of an allegedly looted Camille Pissarro. “No self-respecting government, art dealer, private collector, museum or auction house should trade in or possess art stolen by the Nazis,” he says.

Read more at NYT

A Yves Tanguy work long thought destroyed during a raid by a fascist mob has been rediscovered and restored. She said: “We were able to do different types of imaging and analysis and demonstrate that it was the original work that had been put back together again,” says Professor Jennifer Mass, an American conservation scientist.

Read more at The Guardian

Artist Samara Golden gets the profile treatment in the New York Times this week as she opens a show of new work at Night Gallery in LA. “The piece speaks to the art history of Southern California because of its viscerality,” says Night Gallery founder Davida Nemeroff.

Read more at NYT

Georgia Gardner Gray, Gustav (Tired) (2021), via Sadie Coles

On view this month at Sadie Coles’ Kingly Street location, the gallery has compiled a range of works in both two and three dimensions that deal with the body and space, politics and class, race and identity, all through a range of approaches and executions. Drawing together work by Natalie Ball, Kevin Beasley, Georgia Gardner Gray, Tau Lewis, Jonathan Lyndon Chase, Simphiwe Ndzube, Agata SÅ‚owak and Frieda Toranzo Jaeger, the show brings together a range of perspectives that make for an engaging, enervating project.

KAWS is launching an online exhibition in the video game Fortnite, as well as one at London’s Serpentine Gallery. “Being able to create works,” the artist says, “and the version that I’m viewing in Brooklyn is the version you could be viewing in India, I just started to get really obsessed with the opportunities within that.”

Read more at The Guardian

Yves Laloy, Untitled (1956), via Perrotin

On view this month at two of Galerie Perrotin’s Paris exhibition spaces, artist Yves Laloy’s work gets an expansive and exploratory review, marking the first major exhibition since a 2004 retrospective at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Rennes. Unifying a series of private loans for the show, the exhibition marks an unprecendented look at the architect-turned-painter and his kinetic, colorful painterly constructions. (more…)

A Camille Pissarro work looted by the Nazis will head to US Supreme Court to hear a case over its ownership, as the descendants of Lilly Cassirer Neubauer sue for the painting’s return. “This has been three generations of the Cassirer family trying to take back what is theirs,” says attorney Stephen Zack of the US law firm Boies Schiller Flexner.

Read More at The Guardian

Employees at the Jewish Museum in New York have voted to unionize. “The Jewish Museum is aware that staff have petitioned for a union election,” a spokesperson said in a statement. “The Museum greatly values its staff and will respectfully engage in any process that transpires.”

Read more at Art Newspaper